Happy Friday! New York’s Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA) will no longer post bus and train alerts on Twitter, citing doubts about the platform’s reliability. The exodus continues 🏃‍♀️

🌶 Highlight of the day 🌶

Mercedes unveils $60 / month subscription pricing to unlock faster acceleration in its new EV models. The “Acceleration Increase” subscription unlocks 20-25% faster acceleration and motor output power in the EQE and ESQ models. The glorious trend of automakers paywalling core features continues 🛡️

♨️ Hot off the press launches

Big tech

• YouTube Music rolls out podcasts with a dedicated podcasts tab

• Google to add end-to-end encryption to Authenticator

• Google tests a new ad-slot on the Play Store

• Microsoft integrates Designer into Edge for AI-generated social content

• Pinterest to introduce third-party ads courtesy of Amazon Ads

General and early-stage

• Luca unveils price planning and prediction tools for retailers

• Mindverse ships a platform for building specialized AI agents

• POSH launches its event management and ticketing platform

• Replit announces its own LLaMa-style code LLM

• Lightyear ships a web version of its stock-trading app

🔍 Other good finds

• No go. The unbundling fallacy as a zero-interest rate phenomenon

• Copy wins. Time spent on Instagram grew 24% Y.o.Y due to Reels

• Line in sand. Bipartisan bill to ban social media algorithms on minors

🧈 Twitter nugget

Thanks for reading! If you've got any comments or feedback, please hit reply - I'd love to hear from you :)

- Amol